Little Things
During our vacation trip we went to both Goblin Valley State Park and Arches National Park. These places are known for their stunning large scenery. The scale of things is amazing and encourages photography. Everyone snaps pictures, trying to capture in a still shot the scale of what they are seeing. Or sometimes they take pictures of each other in front of these huge structures as if to document that they really were there. Among the 500 pictures we took of the parks, we have lots of these shots. Howard took lots of pictures of rock textures which he’ll use later for art projects. Kiki took lots of landscape and gnarled tree pictures as reference for future art. I took some landscape shots, but mostly I took pictures of the kids, trying to capture them as they are right now. However I also found myself drawn to tiny things, the small details which are often missed in the grandeur of the landscape.
Goblin Valley was all sand and rock. The sand formed a crust under our feet that sometimes cracked into miniature canyons and boulders. I pondered as I looked, the weather processes necessary to re-create this crust time and again despite the hundreds of thousands of human feet that trample across it every year.
Along the sides of the rock formations were mudslides in miniature. Wind threw coated the sandstone with dust, then rain would cause it to slide and cling.
Goblin Valley was mostly devoid of life. We did find a few plants with flowers up a side canyon. As I admired the tenacity of these flowers to survive in such circumstances, something bright blue buzzed past me. It was a bee. I spent several minutes attempting to capture a picture of him, I never did catch the bright blue one. The one I did manage to photograph was more gray than blue.
Another thing which amazed me about Goblin Valley was the way that it made us seem small. The goblin formations did not look all that large on first glance, but they dwarfed us all once we were among them and climbing. Then of course there was the sky. Enough sky can make anything seem small.
Arches had far more life in it than Goblin Valley. We hiked among desert plants and watched crows soar above our heads. The mammals were hidden away from the squalls which dampened our hiking trail, but we saw signs of them. Spring is a lovely time to visit the desert. It blooms.
There was something wonderful about hiking just after a rainstorm. The ground soaked up the water quickly, leaving only a few puddles nestled in the concavities of rock. Link took it as his personal mission to stomp in as many of these puddles as possible. I was fascinated that the water only penetrated the top lair of sand on the trail. Our footsteps exposed dry sand underneath the wet. The plants were lovely washed clean of dust.
Most of my travels through the parks were occupied with keeping track of my kids or marveling at things on a grand scale, but every so often it was nice to notice the little things